The common-sense observation that the tool is not responsible for the
carpenter's poor use of it has been enlisted to great effect in the gun-control
debate. Although the bumper sticker reductionism of "Guns don't kill
people, people kill people" is at once trite and true, the notion
that people are indeed responsible for their actions, as well as the actions
of the hammers and electric drills and handguns and fuel-injected SUV's
under their control, is close to the status of Holy Writ for conservatives
and libertarians. What's to argue?

On the other hand, this clear and straightforwardly simple thinking eludes
a surprisingly large number of otherwise dependable freedom-and-responsibility
boosters when it comes to mass media. All of a sudden you start hearing
the sort of all-encompassing generalizations and one-size-fits-all thinking
that typifies the average Hillary Clinton supporter's anti-gun views.
Recently, from a pulpit, I heard that television sets and CD's and other
"offending contraptions" should be tossed in the garbage; perhaps
recycling them into toasters or space heaters would be acceptable, but
they should most assuredly not be sold at a garage sale. "You can
protect your family from [the TV poison] without selling it to someone
else, bargain price or otherwise," and apparently you won't be missing
a thing. In the abolitionist view, "there is no downside" to
ridding your home of the electronic multimedia funnels that pipe in the
sick and savage products of a perverse, anti-Christian entertainment industry.

Somehow this sounds more like a "Guns don't kill people, bullets
kill people" argument than the original, human-action-centered syllogism.
We don't like what others are building with them, so out go the hammers
and screwdrivers and belt sanders. Hold up a second!

I have encountered over the last several years a growing number of concerned
parents who have opted to dump the TV set. (Because one cannot escape
it -- music is heard in the car and at the mall and in school -- we'll
leave the critique of pop tunes for another time and focus on television,
the conduit most central to modern media-drenched homes and the easiest
one to turn off completely.) The decision has been made by these well-meaning
Moms and dedicated Dads that American TV fare in the first year of the
2000s is unalloyed crud. It's a wasteland out (in) there.

Or is it? Certainly the most popular sitcoms and nighttime soaps are
puerile and perverted pap, if not outright propaganda from the unreconstructed
Stalinists of Hollywood-on-the-Volga. But right there, sandwiched in the
metastasizing channel listings between "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
and the latest Marilyn Manson video tribute to the sensual joys of demonic
oppression, is a fabulous documentary on the Lewis and Clark expedition.
And over here, on the next page -- floating above the blurb for Agent
Mulder versus the bloodsucking family iguana, the interview with Madonna's
favorite sperm donor of the moment, and the synopsis of Ted Turner's latest
TV-movie on the fascist cannibals of the Catholic Church -- is an invitation
to watch "Jesus of Nazareth" and "Moses, the Lawgiver"
back-to-back later in the week.

One father told me that he just didn't have time to monitor his 12-year-old
son's viewing habits. What occurred to me, of course, is that he might
as well have said that he just never had time to raise his son, to instill
values in him, to teach him how to monitor himself. So the easy answer
for this dad was to dump the TV altogether, a classic example of tossing
the baby out with the bath water. This young man will now be spared "Beverly
Hills 90210" even as he misses the opportunity to see a documentary
on astronaut training. Certainly, as I put it to the father, there is
a way to avoid the former and take advantage of the latter, isn't there?

"Too much work," says Pop-2K. "It's easier just to get
rid of it, all of it."

Yikes.

With hundreds of channels, there truly is something for everyone in the
information-age cafeteria of "custom" TV, with the seemingly
limitless choices of cable and satellite receivers now complemented by
a bevy of new technologies for recording, delaying, replaying, taping,
splicing, slicing, and dicing those propagated pixels (or 0's and 1's
if you've gone digital).

With the capabilities come a torrent of content; in my area (the foothills
northeast of Los Angeles) the cable company gives me ultra-high-speed
Internet access and a TV package comprising all the basic channels, all
the "premium" channels, two Showtime movie channels, two HBO,
two Cinemax, and a couple of others, all for about $80 a month. I expect
to be paying only two-thirds or half that much within a year or so, and
probably for 50 per cent faster net speeds and a half dozen more movie
channels.

Still, I don't watch a whole lot of TV, and I never just plop down in
front of it and scan channels. I get a Sunday paper primarily for the
TV listings, and if something I want to watch is on this week, I can make
time to watch it (rare) or set the VCR to tape it (common). My wife will
unwind with the cooking shows (God bless Emeril Lagasse -- bam!) and we
will get together to watch Jack Hayford or Charles Stanley or D. James
Kennedy or Bishop Charles Blake preach; to hear Bill Buckley (alas, no
longer) and Steve Dunleavy and Brit Hume pontificate; to see Al Gore and
Bill Clinton and their spin squadrons twirl and thrust and parry and obfuscate;
and occasionally to deduce along with Jeremy Brett just who did the dirty
deed that Sherlock Holmes is investigating this time. These are not wasteland
experiences, I assure you.

It is far to facile simply to relegate an entire technology to unimportance
in one's life, and dangerous, too; you will miss a lot of what is happening
around you. If you have children, you might be able to limit the damage
done to your kids via TV programming, but you will also limit enriching
experiences. They will see Buffy and Shannon Doherty's latest snotty Gen-X
character anyway, whether at friends' homes or the mall or even school;
but they won't see it with your play-by-play commentary, followed by a
channel switch to the acceptable alternative you have investigated and
provided.

Yes, TV is a non-stop, pervasive influence in our society. But a TV is
just another tool; to rid your home of it may be a powerful statement,
but in the end it is a self-defeating one. The challenge -- for parents
particularly, but for the rest of us, too, who desire edification and
intellectual stimulation, as well as occasional escapist fare (and that's
okay too!) -- is to control this massively powerful technology.

It is true that a tool can be quickly transformed into a weapon; some
things, like axes, are arguably both to begin with. It might help to view
TV in this light. Ultimately, it is up to each one of us, acting for ourselves
as well as for our children, to use our home's trusty axe to chop the
wood that warms the hearth that heats the house and lights the room so
we can, in safety and comfort, read a story and see the accompanying illustrations.
An intruder, one who may even wish us harm, is always watching for us
to let our guard down, so he can break in and grab that axe and use it
against us.

Now just whose fault is it if we let that happen?

Erik Jay is editor of "What Next? The Internet Journal of Contentious
Persiflage" which you can subscribe to by visiting http://erikjay.com.